I thought that was just an opening gambit, and we could have a possibly, maybe, vaguely interesting back-n-forth. But no! It was much better than that. Links to Tamino are forbidden, and my comment was replaced1 by

[snip, Foster is an ‘undesirable’ who cannot be trusted with statistics]

After a bit, though, even that wasn’t enough, and the snip got rewritten to:

[snip, Foster is an ‘undesirable’ who cannot be trusted with statistics…Winston, please see Kevin Marshall comment below]

I’m sure Tamino will be delighted to learn that his posts are too dangerous for the inhabitants of NTZ to be allowed to see.

NoTricksZone is merely reposting Monckton without trying to understand the bit of basic ignorance that is in that WUWT post. As I have tried to comment (but do not expect to get posted):
Christopher Monckton misses out one important point – RSS data is not surface temperatures! They are upper air (troposphere) temperatures.
Then he rather foolishly compares his graph of one set of troposphere temperatures to the IPCC conclusion from all of the surface temperature datasets!

The actual science from RSS is http://www.remss.com/research/climate
“Over the past 35 years, the troposphere has warmed significantly. The global average temperature has risen at an average rate of about 0.13 degrees Kelvin per decade (0.23 degrees F per decade).”

Ah, you got the Gosselin treatment too? Something similar happened to me when I tried to have a sensible discussion at NTZ. Gosselin is afraid of a lot of things (except being dead wrong of course, that seems to be fine). I find his censoring crusade especially funny from a libertarian constantly lambasting the media for, well, censoring. My advice would be to just stay clear of this guy, unless you want to be held responsible for his impending heart attack 😉

@John: while NTZ itself does not seem to have a lot of readers, he is being the main channel from German denialism into the Anglosphere, so he does have some influence.

Both from experience and from discussing this with clinical psychologist friends:

1) People vary greatly in their comfort with and ability to handle uncertainty.

2) Some people have no problem with it, try to calibrate it, reduce it and explain it. Steve Scheider was terrific and tamino is really very good as well. At the risk of an inverse-Godwin, Feynman noted his comfort with uncertainty.
At one extreme, people see little black-vs-white, mostly shades of gray, confidence intervals, probabilities that aren’t 0 or 1.

3) But for people at the other extreme, that worldview is *terrifying*, because *certainty* is needed. Of course, some may talk of uncertainty (around climate), but that usually seems a cover for absolute, unbending certainty that no actions should be taken, ever.

Sometimes people can flip from some certain viewpoint to the exact opposite without ever occupying the middle. One of my psychologist friends told me of a case where a patient could make such flips, back and forth, over a few days.

If you want to understand the psychology of the deniers, I think understanding the “hierarchical individualists” is as helpful as understanding need for certainty.

” If identity-protective cognition is at work, there’s no reason to believe that white hierarchical individualist males will be uniformly more “risk dismissive” than other people.

They’ll be that way only with regard to private activities the regulation which poses a threat to activities essential to their cultural status. Where regulation itself poses such a threat, they should worry about the risks that such regulation poses. Moreover, if we can find private activities that threaten their cultural identities, their stake in securing regulation of them should motivate them to be risk sensitive in regard to those activities!”

That RSS TLT graph from WUWT and/or Lord Monckton just keeps doing the rounds. The trend line is an obvious cherry-pick.

I doubt that most of the people who show it know the difference between the surface air temperature and the TLT air temperature which appears to be from around 0 to 10 km (ignoring the bits of the north and south pole it excludes).

The RSS people even offer a little browser that makes the trend clear:

Anyway, my UAH cohort and boss John Christy, who does the detailed matching between satellites, is pretty convinced that the RSS data is undergoing spurious cooling because RSS is still using the old NOAA-15 satellite which has a decaying orbit, to which they are then applying a diurnal cycle drift correction based upon a climate model, which does not quite match reality. We have not used NOAA-15 for trend information in years…we use the NASA Aqua AMSU, since that satellite carries extra fuel to maintain a precise orbit.

[Is there anything desperately exciting to track? In the old days the UAH vs RSS fight was exciting, and the satellites showing cooling made the septics all agog, but since the corrects got rid of that it doesn’t seem to be so much fun any more -W]

“… UAH Global temperature up slightly in September
Posted on October 9, 2012 by Anthony Watts
UAH V5.5 Global Temp. Update for Sept. 2012: +0.34 deg. C
By Dr. Roy Spencer
As discussed in my post from yesterday, the spurious warming in Aqua AMSU channel 5 has resulted in the need for revisions to the UAH global lower tropospheric temperature (LT) product.
Rather than issuing an early release of Version 6, which has been in the works for about a year now, we decided to do something simpler: remove Aqua AMSU after a certain date, and replace it with the average of NOAA-15 and NOAA-18 AMSU data. Even though the two NOAA satellites have experienced diurnal drifts in their orbits, we have found that those drifts are in opposite directions and approximately cancel. (The drifts will be corrected for in Version 6.0)….”

If only that were the only population for which this were true.
Quite seriously: scientists, statisticians and skeptics in general, i.e., folks comfortable with uncertainty, may not appreciate just how terrifying it is to some people. This may be relevant to outreach and the forms of explanation.

Obsessive immortal corporate profiteers are more dangerous — much worse.
Thank goodness for obsessive regulators. If they weren’t obsessive they’d be — what?

For example — just one — you might believe that asbestos has been regulated successfully.

Nope:

“… th”… the asbestos industry, to establish new markets, is promoting the use of asbestos in low-to-middle income countries, particularly in Asia, and has created lobby organisations to achieve this goal.

In spite of the scientific evidence and calls to end all use of asbestos by many organisations including the World Health Organization, the World Federation of Public Health Associations, the International Commission on Occupational Health, the International Social Security Association, the International Trade Union Confederation and the World Bank, the use of asbestos is increasing in low-to-middle income countries.

There is little awareness in these countries of the risk that asbestos poses to health; in addition, safety regulations are weak to non-existent.

If unstopped, this continued and increasing use of asbestos will lead to a public health disaster of asbestos-related illness and premature death for decades to come in those countries, repeating the epidemic we are witnessing today in industrialised countries that used asbestos in the past….”

I read Tamino for a while about a year ago — possibly during the Marcott paper release which went down in flames — and found that his vaunted math was quite pedestrian and not applied to the salient issues. So I don’t go there anymore, and those who praises Tamino go off into the “pedestrian” cubbyhole. Did you say Tamino is “scarey”? Ha ha.

I read Tamino for a while about a year ago — possibly during the Marcott paper release which went down in flames — and found that his vaunted math was quite pedestrian and not applied to the salient issues.

Are you referring to this paper by Marcott? Google Scholar turns up 96 citations so far — not bad for going down in flames. Are you an expert yourself (I’ll settle for either a CV or some citations to your publications in the peer-reviewed literature), or a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect?

I read Tamino for a while about a year ago — possibly during the Marcott paper release which went down in flames — and found that his vaunted math was quite pedestrian and not applied to the salient issues.

False claim about Marcott13, in which exactly no serious errors of any kind have been found. False claim about Tamino, demonstrated here wrt M13.

Tamino neatly demonstrates that the contrarian claim that M13 cannot tell us that modern warming is exceptional during the Holocene is false.

Which is one reason among many why contrarians dislike him and pretend that he is biased or of limited ability or both.

> I read Tamino for a while … — and found …
Question being what exactly did you find? Some guy’s opinion? Or did you do some arithmetic on your own? I’ll guess not, since you haven’t published it or made it public online. Refutation welcome. Intelligent criticism always is.

(A) Tamino, exposed as a brazen liar, his Central England hockey stick having been promoted by his cult followers back when I started publicizing the alarm-falsifying CET data set, so I had to delve into the unstated details, and boy was it ever misleading, pulling Phil Jones into the mix too:

This bluntly confirms that: “Foster is an ‘undesirable’ who cannot be trusted with statistics”

(B) Your link is in reference to Cowtan & Way, a bizarre Frankenstein “study” that used satellite temperature records as a statistical tool to add virtual ground thermometer data to the mostly uncharted arctic, thus pumping up the global average temperature. There’s a Science 101 problem though, which you are well aware of in a way that makes both yourself and Foster scammers, that the satellite data used itself *falsifies* this claim of a sudden recent warming spike.

“I have no idea how one deals with this– to be candid, McIntyre or Watts in handcuffs is probably the only thing that will slow things down.” – Robert Way in the exposed secret forum of John Cook’s site.

(C) Intellectually disowning dishonest players is not done out of fear, but out of disgust.

“(A) Tamino, exposed as a brazen liar, his Central England hockey stick having been promoted by his cult followers back when I started publicizing the alarm-falsifying CET data set, so I had to delve into the unstated details, and boy was it ever misleading, pulling Phil Jones into the mix too”

Ah, right, temperature records from 1660 are as accurate, in your view, as what is taken as the modern instrumental record, so anyone who concentrates on the latter rather than the former is “misleading”.

“The earliest years of the series, from 1659 to October 1722 inclusive, for the most part only have monthly means given to the nearest degree or half a degree” …

Your link is in reference to Cowtan & Way, a bizarre Frankenstein “study” that used satellite temperature records as a statistical tool to add virtual ground thermometer data to the mostly uncharted arctic, thus pumping up the global average temperature. There’s a Science 101 problem though, which you are well aware of in a way that makes both yourself and Foster scammers, that the satellite data used itself *falsifies* this claim of a sudden recent warming spike.

No doubt you’re a better judge of the Cowtan and Way paper than the expert reviewers and all the working climate scientists who’ve praised it. What peer-reviewed venue have you published your criticisms in, again?

Also, while Dr. Connolley may be aware of the “Science 101 problem” you reference, I’m not. Can you explain it to me yourself, in detail? TIA.